Today, I am writing, in an answer to a comment, made by a guy named Denying-History, one of the new readers of my blog.

I am quoting his comment:

Begin quote

Hans stark talks about the pouring of Zyklon though the room of two holes, then the holes being closed. Morgue 1 (based on HC’s view) had three holes, but they say that Stark could have mistaken the number of holes in use. This again fits broads model of two cans of 1kg, though we don’t have a size record from Stark.

End Quote

My 1998 photo of roof of the Krema 1 gas chamber in Auschwitz main camp

In September 1998, I climbed up on the roof of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp and photographed the holes, through which the Zyklon-B poison gas was allegedly poured. My photo above shows the holes, which are covered with wooden lids.

My 1998 photo of SS hospital and the roof of the Auschwitz 1 gas chamber

The photo above shows the hospital for wounded or sick SS soldiers in the German Army. Stupid Germans!!! Didn’t they realize that some gas fumes might have wafted over to the hospital on a hot summer day?

No, actually it was perfectly safe because the holes on the roof were covered with wooden lids. One SS man would lift up the lid, while another SS man would quickly pour the poison pellets into the gas chamber room below.

Gas chamber in foreground and SS hospital for wounded soldiers in the background

The famous photo above, which I did not take, shows that there was only a narrow street between the gas chamber and the hospital. The SS men in the hospital could have just dashed across the street, and into the gas chamber, if they decided to commit suicide.

My 1998 photo of the front entrance into gas chamber in the Auschwitz I camp

My photograph above shows one of the entrances into the reconstructed Krema I gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp. This door was added by the Nazis in the fall of 1944 when the gas chamber was converted into an air raid shelter.

When I visited Auschwitz in 2005, this door was locked and the tourist entrance was through the original door on the other side of the building. In 1998, my tour guide and I entered through the metal door.

The gas chamber room at Auschwitz, which was actually a morgue for dead bodies, was designed to be used by the SS men for shelter in case of an air raid attack.

In my 2005 photo below, notice the peephole in the metal door. This peephole was for SS soldiers to look out to see if all was clear after a bombing raid. Anyone looking in, through this peephole, would only have seen the black wall behind the door.

My 2005 photo of the air raid shelter door

My 2005 photo of wooden door into the gas chamber room

Robert Jan van Pelt & Deborah Dwork wrote in their book entitled “Auschwitz 1270 to the Present,” that the routine gassing of humans was inaugurated at the Auschwitz I camp on September 16, 1941 when 900 Soviet Prisoners of War were killed in the mortuary room of the crematorium which had just been converted into a gas chamber.

According to these two historians, shortly before that, the mortuary room had been put into service as an execution chamber where Polish political prisoners were shot because the Black Wall, formerly used for executions, proved to be too far away from the crematorium for an efficient system.

Sadly, the bullet holes, made by the shooting of the Polish prisoners, have been plastered over and can no longer be seen.

My photo of the washroom door, which opens into the gas chamber, is shown below. Note that there is a glass window in the door.

My 1998 photo of the washroom door into the gas chamber

On my visit to the gas chamber in 1998, I asked my tour guide what kept the prisoners from breaking the door and letting in fresh air. She told me that an SS man was posted behind the door, ready to shoot anyone who tried to break the glass.

After Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss had been beaten half to death by his British captors, he described the 1941 gassing of the Soviet Prisoners of War in the following quote from his memoirs:

Begin quote

I have a clearer recollection of the gassing of 900 Russians that took place shortly afterwards in the old crematorium, since the use of block 11 for this purpose caused too much trouble. While the transport was detraining, holes were pierced in the earth and concrete ceiling of the mortuary. The Russians were ordered to undress in an anteroom; they then quietly entered the mortuary, for they had been told they were to be deloused. The whole transport exactly filled the mortuary to capacity. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down through the holes in the roof. I do not know how long this killing took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of “Gas!” then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both doors. But the doors held. They were opened several hours later so that the place might be aired.

October 9, 2016

Some people have no respect for anything – including the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were allegedly killed, including many Jews that were allegedly exterminated with Zyklon-B, a poison gas that was used, by the Nazis, to kill the lice that spread typhus, a deadly disease.

Czech Jews protest the naming of a children’s volleyball team Cyklon B, after the poison that Nazis used to kill Jews.

This quote is from news article quoted above:

Begin quote from news article:

Czech Jews protested the naming of a children’s volleyball team after the poison that Nazis used to kill Jews and Roma in gas chambers during the Holocaust.

The team Cyklon B – the Czech-language transliteration for the Zyklon B pesticide that the Nazis used — participated recently in a Prague tournament featuring teams from Czech Republic orphanages.

Fans at the tournament, which was sponsored by the ING Bank Fund of the Tereza Maxová Foundation, shouted “Go Cyklon B,” the Pravo daily reported Thursday.

End quote from news article

What does this have to do with anything?

People who study the Holocaust need to know the history of the Czech people, so I am going to tell you a little bit of history:

The Czech people initially had their own dynasty, known as the Premyslides. The famous “Good King Wencelas” was the ruler of the Czechs in the 10th century.

The Czech homeland of Bohemia, which along with Moravia, now constitutes the Czech Republic, came under the rule of the Austrian Hapsburg empire in 1526. It was Joseph II of the Hapsburg family, the ruler of the Austrian Empire, who built a town and named it Theresienstadt (Theresa’s city) after his mother, the Empress Maria Theresa.

This is the same Joseph II, in whose honor Josefov, the Jewish quarter in Prague, was originally named Josefstadt in 1850. Although his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, was an anti-Semite who had expelled the Jews from the Austrian empire for three years, Joseph II was an enlightened monarch who emancipated the Jews of Prague when he became Emperor in 1780 after the death of his mother.

In 1780, when the town of Theresienstadt was originally built as a military garrison at the junction of the Ohre and Elbe rivers, near the Sudeten mountain range in the province of Bohemia, the Czech people, who had lived in this area since the 5th century, did not have an independent country of their own.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed after World War I ended, the Hapsburg Empire, by then a multi-ethnic country called Austria-Hungary, was broken up into the separate independent countries of Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The new country of Czechoslovakia was made up of the former states of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Russian Ruthenia and part of Silesia.

Czechs and ethnic Germans had been living side by side in Bohemia for over a thousand years, and the new country had a population of 6 million Czechs, 3.5 million Germans and 2 million Slovaks.

The Czechs and Slovaks were both Slavic people, like the Russians and the Poles, but the Germans were a completely different ethnic group which had rarely intermarried with the Slavs.

Do these children, who are playing volleyball know anything about the history of the Czechs? I don’t think so. They just want to have fun; they don’t know that the name of their volleyball team upsets the old folks who still remember what the swastika once stood for.

August 29, 2016

Recent photo of the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site

In the photo above, note the height of the trees in the background. The old photo below shows virtually no trees.

Photo of the ruins of Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taken in 1945

My 2005 photo of the same ruins

Krema II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, shown in the photos above, was the site of the largest mass murder in the history of mankind, according to Robert Jan Van Pelt, a noted Holocaust historian.

It was here that over 500,000 Jews were gassed to death with Zyklon-B, an insecticide that was also used to disinfect clothing in the camp, according to Mr. Van Pelt.

The old black and white photo was taken shortly after Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union on January 27, 1945.

The photo at the top of the page shows the same view of the ruins of Krema II, taken recently. The trees in the background are at the west end of the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau.

These photos show the on-going effort to preserve the ruins of Krema II. Robert Jan Van Pelt calls Krema II the “Holy of Holies.” He feels that this is a place that demands great reverence and respect for the thousands of innocent victims who perished here.

My 2005 photo of the ruins of the oven room in Krema II where bodies were burned

Old photo shows Krema II building before it was blown up

The old black and white photo above shows the Krema II building in 1943, when it was still under construction; the roof of the partially-underground gas chamber, covered with about two inches of snow, is on the right.

The ceiling of the gas chamber room was around eight feet high; the exterior roof was about three feet above ground.

There were four holes in the roof of the gas chambers in both Krema II and Krema III; the roofs were made of reinforced concrete, six inches thick. Through these four holes on the roof, an SS man, wearing a gas mask, would lower an open can of Zyklon-B gas pellets down into four wire-mesh columns inside the gas chamber.

When the gassing was finished, the pellets were retrieved and sent back to the Degesch company so that they could be filled with poison and used again.

Michael Kula, a Holocaust survivor, testified as an eye-witness to the use of wire-mesh columns for the Zyklon-B pellets, but these columns are no longer in existence.

July 8, 2016

Baracke X is the building where the alleged Dachau gas chamber was located

Wall of Dachau gas chamber has two openings to the outside through which gas pellets were allegedly poured into the chamber

Close-up of one of the wall openings

Visitors to Dachau enter the Baracke X building, shown in the first photo above, through a door on the south side of the building, and proceed through the waiting room, and then into the undressing room before entering the gas chamber. On the wall of the undressing room is a sign which tells visitors the following:

Begin quote from the sign

Gas Chamber

This is the center of potential mass murder. The room was disguised as “showers” and equipped with fake shower spouts to mislead the victims and prevent them from refusing to enter the room. During a period of 15 to 20 minutes up to 150 at a time could be suffocated to death through prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B).

End quote from the sign

The second photo above shows three empty holes on the ceiling of the alleged gas chamber, where shower heads had been before they were stolen by tourists as souvenirs. Just below the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber are two light fixture boxes [not shown], which were claimed, in a film shown at the Nuremberg IMT, to be the “top vents” for introducing the poison gas into the gas chamber.

Information given to tourists about the gas chamber at Dachau varies according to the person who is guiding the tour. Some guides tell visitors that the gas chamber was never used, while others maintain that the gas chamber was used a few times. If the gas chamber was never used, why was it built? Some of the guides say that it was used to train SS men in how to use a gas chamber.

A recent visitor who took a tour of Dachau wrote the following on her blog:

Begin quote from blog post:

Interestingly enough, Dachau was never considered an extermination camp. Hitler made sure that none of these camps resided in Germany. He wanted them to be in the countries that he occupied so it would be easier to transport the foreign people to them. So, knowing this, many wonder why Dachau had a gas chamber in it. The most popular theory is that since Dachau was one of the first concentration camps, it acted as a model for others. When Germans were trained to work in concentration camps, they were trained to use gas chambers, and some were trained at Dachau.

Some guides say that the gas came through fake shower heads, but others tell visitors that gas pellets were poured onto the floor through the two screened openings on the east wall of the gas chamber.

All but one of the shower heads has been stolen by visitors as souvenirs and at least one guide tells tourists that the gas pellets were dropped through the holes in the ceiling. Three of the holes for the shower heads are shown in the second photo above.

Although anyone can look up into the holes where the shower heads used to be and see that there are no pipes of any kind there, one tour guide told a visitor on September 24, 2008 that there were special plumbing pipes that brought the gas through the shower heads. It has been known for at least sixty years that the Zyklon-B gas that was allegedly used at Dachau was in the form of pellets the size of peas, and could not have come through the small holes in the shower heads.

Pipe on the wall of the Dachau undressing room next to the alleged gas chamber

I took the photo above in the undressing room for the Dachau shower room. Holohoaxers now claim that the Dachau shower room was really a gas chamber. If the alleged gas chamber was actually a shower room, the pipe shown in the photo above was probably a water pipe. The pipe shown at the top of the photo is the electrical wiring for the lights in the room.

My photograph above shows the electrical wiring on the north wall of the undressing room, which is next to the gas chamber. Below the wiring is a large pipe which comes through the wall from the corridor and enters the gas chamber. The other side of this pipe cannot be seen inside the gas chamber because it enters the room above the 7.6 foot ceiling of the gas chamber. The ceiling of the undressing room is about 10 feet high.

The text of the display on the undressing room wall describes the undressing room as follows: “Disrobing – This is were (sic) the victims were to leave their clothes before entering the gas chamber disguised as ‘showers.’ Their clothing was to be brought to the disinfecting chambers [in the same building] before the next group [of prisoners] could enter the room.”

The prisoners’ clothing was disinfected with Zyklon-B, the same gas that was allegedly used to murder the victims in the alleged Dachau gas chamber. Four disinfection chambers are in the same building where the alleged homicidal gas chamber is located. The disinfection of the clothing was done to kill the body lice which spreads typhus.

The west wall of the undressing room has a door into the corridor that runs behind all the rooms in the crematorium building, including the gas chamber. This door, which is shown in the photograph above, is locked and visitors are not allowed into the corridor. Although visitors are not allowed into the corridor behind the gas chamber, the display on the undressing room wall has both a photograph and a drawing of the pipes in the corridor. The title of this section is “Operating facilities in the adjacent left corridor.”

The drawing in the display was done in May 1945 by Captain Fribourg, a member of the French Military Mission with the Sixth Army Group, Chemical Warfare. Captain Fribourg did an examination of the gas chamber at Dachau for one day and then wrote a report in which he did not reach any definite conclusion. He was of the opinion that a second visit would be necessary in order to study the system for circulating the gas and he also recommended that the walls be tested, but this was apparently never done.

France and the Soviet Union were in charge of prosecuting the German war criminals on the charge of Crimes Against Humanity at the Nuremberg IMT, but no report on the walls of the Dachau gas chamber was entered into the proceedings.

The pipes and valves behind the west wall of the gas chamber can be seen in the movie that is shown at the Dachau museum. This movie has footage from the film that was shown at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal as proof that a gas chamber was used to murder prisoners at Dachau.

The narration in the film explains the gassing procedure as follows: “Inside the showerbath — the gas vents. On the ceiling — the dummy shower heads. In the engineer’s room — the intake and outlet pipes. Push buttons to control inflow and outtake of gas. A hand-valve to regulate pressure. Cyanide powder was used to generate the lethal smoke.”

The “push buttons” referred to in the film are shown in the drawing done by Captain Fribourg, but they are gone now. According to the information on the undressing room wall, they were stolen during the postwar years. There were 4 push buttons and 4 sets of light fixture boxes in the gas chamber when the American liberators arrived. However, four of the light fixture boxes now have no lights. According to the film shown at Nuremberg, four of the light fixture boxes were used instead as “gas vents” to put lethal gas into a fake shower room.

My question that is dug deep in [into] my mind is, what exactly the Jews did to Hitler, his Nazi commandants cohorts and the entire German nation for them to have had the obsessive need to try [to] wipe them off the face of the earth?

The main objection [objective] of the Nazis was the dehumanization and humiliation of people while making the person [feel] insignificant and maximizing the use of his or her body and belongings. Shaving hair had [a] two fold [purpose], taking away from the person’s recognizable image while using his or her hair for industrial purpose. The human ash at the end of the process of making people simply disappear of [off] the face of the earth was used as fertilizer. They [The] inmates were given a number, which was tattooed on their left arm in order to strip them off [of] their identity name.

Majdanek eagle monument Photo credit: Simon Robertson

In Majdanek Camp III a three bird statue stands, built in 1943 by a [Majdanek] camp’s [camp] prisoner whom the Nazis commissioned for the job. The statue, made of prisoners’ ash, in fact is the first Holocaust memorial. [It is shown in the photo above]
the artist had the bird’s head facing east a message to the prisoners that the Russian army is getting closer and hope could be expected to come to them from the east but the Nazis, immersed in their hate for humanity and ego, did not get the message.

Almost at the beginning of the walk through the [Majdanek] camp you walk into an empty filed [field] which was once the “selektzia”-selection field, the Nazis named it ‘rose garden,’ because it was fenced by barbed wire fence that reminded the SS officers or rose bush thorns. [Actually, there was a real rose garden there] There the Nazis decided whom [who] among the arrivals is useful to them and who must die. When, in 1942, the Nazi regime decided to liquidate the Jewish ghettos, Jews arrived to this field and there, according to the Nazis selection system, their pathetic future was decided upon. There prisoners were shaved, striped [stripped] off [of] their clothes and belongings, took [given] a shower and [a] chemicals’ bath and some were gassed either by Zyklon-B or carbon monoxide, which caused them [to have] a terrible death, and then [they were] burned already there.

End quote from news article

The alleged gas chamber building at the alleged Majdanek death camp

The gas chambers at Majdanek are located within sight of the main highway that goes past the camp. The gas chamber building is barrack Number 41 which is shown in my photo above.

A sign on the building, shown in the photo, says “Bad und Desinfektion” (Bath and Disinfection), which the Museum guidebook says was “to lull the vigilance of those condemned to death.”

There are actually two buildings near the entrance to the camp where Zyklon-B was used. Only the building used for gassing people with Zyklon-B was shown on the tour that I took. The other “gas chamber” is in barrack Number 42. This gas chamber was used for delousing clothing, with the same Zyklon-B, when the camp was in operation. Barrack Number 42 is off limits to visitors. Why can’t tourists see building #42, used for killing lice in clothing?

It seems that the stupid Nazis were trying to save the lives of the Jews, by killing lice with Zyklon-B, at the same time that they were killing them with the same Zyklon-B.

Behind the gas chamber building, where you see the row of poplar trees in the photo above, is the street which was part of a main road. The small black building to the right is a guard tower. The large gravel-covered square in front of the building was called the “rose field” or Rosenfeld in German. This was a Nazi joke. There were no roses there, but it was the place where the Jews were assembled on arrival at the camp, and Rosenfeld referred to the “persons selected,” according to the guide book. Selection meant choosing which prisoners were fit for work and which would go to the gas chamber. Rosenfeld is a common Jewish name.

The article tells the story of how an 11-year-old boy was saved twice, by his father, from a gas chamber in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Normally, an 11-year-old boy would have stayed with his mother at Birkenau, not with his father, while waiting for his turn to be gassed.

Women and children waiting to go into the gas chamber at Birkenau

The women and children in the photo above are looking across the road toward the Sauna in Birkenau where the incoming Jews took a shower, and their clothing was disinfected with Zyklon-B.

There were 4 large homicidal gas chambers at the 425-acre Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, plus two old farmhouses where Jews were routinely gassed with the deadly poison called Zyklon-B, which was also used to kill lice.

Ruins of Krema II gas chamber

The following quote is from the news article, cited above:

Begin quote

Seventy-one years after the Holocaust, a concentration camp survivor told his story about his father saved his life while at the deadly concentration camp Auschwitz.

On Sunday, Nate Leipciger, 88, shared his remarkable survivor story at the annual Saskatoon Holocaust Memorial at the Agudas Israel Synagogue on McKinnon Avenue in Saskatoon [Canada].

He told the packed room how, as a boy in Auschwitz, he didn’t fully grasp what the Nazis had in store for the Jews.

“At 11 years old, I had no idea that the Nazis are going to murder us,” Leipciger said. “Not even when I was standing in front of the gas chamber in Auschwitz, did it occur to me that my life was going to be in danger.”

The article continues with this quote:

Begin Quote

He [Nate Leipciger] told the audience how at one point, he found himself in line for the deadly gas chamber. But his father acted fast, pulling Leipciger out of the lineup, taking him into the concentration camp, where he then saw the unforgiving labour camps and conditions men and women lived in.

That’s when we found out what they were doing to our people, they told us, that our people are now being processed in the gas chamber and that our lifespan in Birkenau was four months–either we get shipped out to Germany or we will end up in the gas chamber. Not a very good future.”

His father’s second heroic moment came when the Nazis were ready to ship Leipciger’s father to a factory in Germany, but his father made a case to a Nazi officer to bring his son along with him.

“At the risk of his own life my father approached [a Nazi officer] and begged him to let me go with him to Germany to a factory and that’s how I was saved from certain death of gassing at Auschwitz,” Leipciger said.

End quote

My photo of a fence that divided sections of the Birkenau camp

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp is huge, covering 425 acres. The boundaries of the Birkenau camp stretch a mile in one direction and a mile and a half in the other direction. When construction, on the camp, was completed, it had over 300 buildings with a capacity of 200,000 prisoners. The entire Birkenau camp was enclosed by an electrified barbed wire fence around the perimeter of the camp.

The interior of the camp was divided into nine sections and each section was surrounded by another electrified barbed wire fence. Men and women were in separate sections, and the younger children stayed in the women’s section. An 11-year-old boy would probably have been put into the women’s camp.

Young boys walking out of the Birkenau camp after it was liberated

There were many young boys, aged 11 or younger, who survived Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Roth experienced first-hand the horrors that most of us have only read about in textbooks. He recounted being separated from his family, only to watch his grandparents, aunt and cousin be led to the gas chambers. Through the holes in the ceilings, Roth watched as Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide infamous for its use in camps like Auschwitz and Dachau, kill his family and hundreds of others. Meanwhile, he was ushered away to Auschwitz with his brother, where he had to perform manual labor while being starved.

In the above quote, it sounds as if Irving Roth were allowed to watch as gas pellets were thrown through the holes in the ceiling of the gas chamber [in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp] when what the writer obviously meant was that Irving Roth was allowed to watch while the Zyklon-B gas was poured into the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz camp through holes in the ceiling.

My 1998 photo of the holes in the roof of the gas chamber in the Auschwitz main camp

Irving Roth was a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, not at the main Auschwitz camp. Was he taken to the main camp so that he could watch the gassing procedure? Did the Nazis allow him to live so that he could come to America after the war and educate children about the Holohoax?

This quote is also from the news article:

At the age of ten, Irving Roth was in a war with the world that he was not capable of fighting, and at the age of fourteen, he was taken from his family, packed inside a cattle-car with hundreds of people and forced to fight for his life in Auschwitz Death Camp.

So little Irving was 14 years old when he was taken to the “Auschwitz Death Camp.” As we all know, children under the age of 15 were sent immediately to the gas chamber. But not Irving Ross; he was saved so that he could tell his story to little children 70 years later.

What effect does this have on these children? Are they being taught to hate the German people? Yes, I think that Irving Ross is teaching hatred.

This quote is also from the news article:

Most people that entered Auschwitz died there. Each night while entering the showers, the prisoners were inspected by a doctor, who decided whether or not each of the prisoners were allowed to continue on living.

Did you catch that? The prisoners at Auschwitz were given a shower “each night” during a time when most people in America did not have a shower in their bathroom; most people, in the 1940ies, took a Saturday night bath. The water was not changed after each person’s bath — the whole family bathed in the same water which had been heated on a wood-burning stove.

My personal opinion is that Irving Roth was never in a concentration camp. I think that he has made up his stupid stories in order to educate young children in the Holohoax.

The young boy on the far left has been identified as Stephan Ross, who was liberated from the Dachau camp. Were there two young boys named Ross who were involved in the Holohoax?

August 7, 2015

One of my most favorite TV shows is the series entitled Bones, which is currently in its 11th season. The series is loosely based on the life and writings of novelist and forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Reichs.

Reruns of the show are on TV and I like to watch them over and over again. Yesterday, I watched an old show which featured a crime that had occurred in Argentina. On this show, Zyklon-B was mentioned.

The main character in the show, who has the nickname Bones, is a genius who literally knows everything. As soon as she learns that Zyklon-B was found on some bones, she knows that this is somehow related to the Nazi concentration camps.

On the Bones TV show, it was mentioned that a man named Haus (House) was involved in the crime. In the show, Haus was the Commandant of the concentration camp called Majdanek.

Old photo shows the gate into the Majdanek camp in Poland

The Majdanek concentration camp, in the Polish city of Lubin, was in operation from October 1, 1941 to July 23, 1944 when it was liberated by soldiers of the Soviet Union.

The old photograph above shows the original main entrance into the Majdanek concentration camp. On either side of the gate, there were sentry boxes, painted with black and white chevron stripes. Although there doesn’t seem to be much security at this gate, the interior of the camp was divided into fields or compounds, each surrounded by a double row of barbed wire fencing.

During a commercial on the Bones TV show, I rushed to my computer and looked up the names of all the commandants at Majdanek.

The names of the commandants at Majdanek were Karl Otto Koch, Max August Koegel, Hermann Florstedt, Martin Gottfried Weiss, and Arthur Liebehenschel.

Karl Otto Koch one of the commandants at the Majdanek camp

Pictured above is Karl Otto Koch, the first Commandant of the Majdanek camp. Koch had previously been the Commandant of Buchenwald, but he was sent to Majdanek as punishment after he was arrested in Weimar for non-payment of taxes.

In 1943, Koch was brought back to Weimar and put on trial by SS Judge Georg Konrad Morgen on charges of ordering the murder of two prisoners at Buchenwald and taking bribes from Jewish prisoners. He was convicted and executed by the Nazis before the end of the war.

In the Bones episode, a former commandant of Majdanek is still alive, and living in Argentina, but he can’t be extradited for trial.

On the Bones show, it is discovered that a skeleton found in Argentina has traces of Zyklon-B which was used in the Nazi camps.

I give the Bones producers a lot of credit for doing a show featuring Zyklon B and the Majdanek camp. I am sure that I was not the only person who rushed to a computer to look up the facts.

Unopened cans of Zyklon-B and a gas mask were found at the Majdanek concentration camp

For those too lazy to look it up, here is what Wikipedia says about Zyklon-B:

Zyklon b was the trade name of a pesticide invented in Germany in the early 1920s. It conisted (sic) of hydrogen cynaide (prussic acid)….

According to the Majdanek museum guidebook, the camp was initially called the Concentration Camp at Lublin (Konzentrationslager Lublin); then the name was changed to Prisoner of War Camp at Lublin (Kriegsgefangenenlager der Waffen-SS Lublin), but in Feb. 1943, the name reverted back to Concentration Camp. Throughout its existence, Majdanek received transports of Prisoners of War, including a few Americans.

Although the first prisoners at Majdanek were Russian Prisoners of War, who were transferred from a barbed wire enclosure at Chelm, the camp soon became a detention center for Jews after the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was planned at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942.

Mass transports of Jews began arriving at the Majdanek camp, beginning in April 1942, during the same time period that the Auschwitz II camp, which was originally a POW camp for Soviet soldiers, was being converted into an extermination camp for Jews.

The headquarters for Operation Reinhard, which was set up after the Wannsee Conference, was in Lublin, near the Majdanek camp. The clothing that was confiscated from the prisoners who were sent to the three Operation Reinard camps (Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec) was brought to Majdanek to be disinfected with a poison gas called Zyklon-B. The same gas was allegedly used in homicidal gas chambers at Majdanek to murder thousands of Jews. [Sorry, I have to use the word “allegedly” until I see some proof.]

My blog post today is an answer to the information in this news article.

This quote is from the news article, cited above:

During his time at Auschwitz, Groening’s job was to collect the belongings of the deportees after they arrived at the camp by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.

“The conviction of Oskar Groening for his actions sends an unequivocal message that, although he may not have led or directly participated in the atrocities at Auschwitz, he was clearly an accessory to the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis,” the UK’s Holocaust Educational Trust said in a statement Wednesday, asserting that his actions directly facilitated the murder of 300,000 Jews. […]

“The world has to understand that it is not an excuse to have worked on the economic system” of the camps, Holocaust educator Rabbi Avraham Krieger told The Jerusalem Post. “He knew that he was part of a whole machinery of killing. Just because didn’t hold a gun or pour gas into the gas chamber it doesn’t change the picture.”

He didn’t POUR GAS into the gas chamber? Was this liquid gas, like the gas that you might pour into the gas tank of a car?

My photo of Zyklon-B pellets, taken at Mauthausen memorial site

Hole in the ceiling of the Auschwitz 1 gas chamber, through which the gas pellets were thrown

The gas that was allegedly used to kill the Jews was in the form of pellets that were thrown into the alleged gas chambers through holes in the roof. IMHO, the gas was thrown into the gas chambers, not poured.

Degesch machine was used in disinfection gas chambers

The Nazis used Zyklon-B for disinfecting the clothing of the prisoners, and allegedly for the gassing of the Jews. The machine in the photo above was used for disinfecting the clothing of the prisoners in order to save lives. By using this machine, the pellets could be automatically put into a basket where they could be recovered and reused. In the homicidal gas chambers, the Zyklon-B pellets were allegedly dropped on the heads of the prisoners, and the pellets could not be recovered.

I don’t believe that Oskar Groening knew anything whatsoever about the gassing of the Jews at Auschwitz, or he might have explained all this.